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Peoplesoft explains "two-day" port to smart phone of CRM app

Producing a full-blown customer relationship management program in two days clearly involves some trick. At Microsoft's Mobility Developers Conference, they revealed how it was done.

"It is already a shipping product which we released in March," explained Dave Tonnison, product marketing manager for PeopleSoft Mobile. "What delegates saw this morning was the CRM sales application. There's also CRM field service application. Underlying that is the technology which drives it, which allows customers as well as us to develop further applications," he said.

CRM is seen as key at the moment. The first release is Windows, but the technology is entirely XML based, using IBM's DB2 database engine.

"What we're seeing there, and one of the reasons it was so quick to port; is a tiny application. We have less than 2 megabytes of code for the device, and it's not the app which is being ported, but the pieces. So DB2 Everywhere is the data store; the application server and HTML rendering from that is an existing application, which just works through the pocket edition of Internet Explorer."

Development was particularly simple because of the way data and application are integrated. "The applications are defined as metadata along with the data. So when we update any part of the database, we can have customisations or additional functionality for the application synchronised with the device at the same time. It's a web service using XML as the transport mechanism to the device where it is executed and rendered as that component.

The XML doesn't imply that this is .Net based. "The way we are operating doesn't particularly require us to be part of that. We have been up at their porting centre to move it, but the technologies we use are pure HTML, with XML as the transport mechanism between our systems and the device. We've written the piece that accepts the XML as part of that two-meg code piece, but the development environment is on the server side in our own development toolset," said Tonnison.

"If we had the .Net framework, it would make it easier," he conceded "but we're developing to a standard set of technologies. So .Net would help to rationalise the market and it would be one of the common standards. But we aren't being specifically Microsoft; in the enterprise space, we understand that customers may go down other routes."